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Forward snipit or copy of receipt to gowest36@gmail.com and you will receive in your email a Secret Link with a password to your bonus material! This is a one-time use of your email (unless you already subscribe to my newsletter)!

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EUREKA! BONANZA!

The California Gold Rush—when Gold Fever spread across America, it emptied towns, stripped ships of their crews, left women husbandless, children fatherless. The stories, especially of the women who sought to make their own fortunes, are awe-inspiring and, in some instances, flat-out amazing.

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Sometimes when I do research, I discover fascinating individuals who led gloriously exciting lives and then retired in peace, children and grandchildren sitting at their feet. The happily ever after. The ending we’d all like. Truth is, though, sometimes a hero has her moment early on and from there it’s not a very pretty spiral downward.

This is my impression of the life of Apache warrior woman Dahteste (pronounced ta-DOT-say).

Born around 1860 she chose her path as a warrior. The Apache let you do that. A fairly open-minded society, you could be a warrior, a homemaker, a medicine man, whatever, as long as you worked at it and could deliver. Dahteste was known for her beauty, but she was also clearly respected for her fighting, riding, hunting, and shooting skills. She was fast and she was mean. No man challenged her light-heartedly. And she proved her worth repeatedly on raids with the Apache. In fact, she rode with Cochise (you might remember him. He led an uprising against the U.S. government that started in 1861 and didn’t end until ’72). Remarkably, Dahteste was barely a teenager! Her fighting didn’t end, however, with Cochise’s acceptance of a peace treaty. She continued it by riding with Geronimo. Who knows how many “white-eyes” lost their lives to her rifle?

Geronimo surrendered in 1886. Dahteste over the years had picked up quite a bit of English, had even served as a cavalry scout for a time, so she negotiated the great chief’s surrender. Her reward? She was arrested and shipped to a prison in Florida where she stayed for eight years. Then she was moved to the military prison at Fort Sill, OK where she was a guest for nineteen years. During her time as a resident of the US Army’s military prison system, she survived pneumonia and tuberculosis. I suspect she survived much more than that.

During this time she divorced her husband Ahnandia (one of Geronimo’s original warriors) and within a few years married fellow inmate and former Army scout Coonie. The couple was released in 1919 and moved to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico.

Dahteste, reports say, never spoke English again and wore only beautiful beaded native clothing. She left her long black hair down and unbraided, but always brushed. She was a proud Apache woman who walked with her chin up.

Though she did, indeed, retire with children and grandchildren around her feet, none of them were hers by blood, and she was not generally known to smile much. I hope she spent her final years enjoying peace and happiness, but I don’t get that sense. I think Dahteste was a survivor and she did so with more grim determination than optimism.

Sometimes I write about the women who fought for this country’s independence in very real, sacrificial ways. Sometimes I write about women who fought the land and the times to settle difficult territory. Susan Anderson is definitely the latter.

Born in Indiana in 1870, she moved with her family to Cripple Creek Colorado at the beginning of the town’s gold rush. Deciding she needed more of a challenge than the rough and rowdy mining town could provide, her father encouraged her to attend medical school. In 1893, she entered the University of Michigan medical school. Little did she know how difficult the journey to put two letters behind her name would be.

She graduated in ’97, but while in school, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The illness would plague her the rest of her life. She returned to Cripple Creek and tended to the miners there for three years, but the pretty, petite doctor was jilted by her fiancée in 1900. That same year she suffered the loss of her little brother.

In need of a change, she relocated her practice to Denver. Surely, the bustling, modern city would provide a steady flow of patients. Not. Anderson nearly starved to death. Patients were very leery of a female doctor, especially when there were already several male doctors in town. Frustrated, she moved again, this time to Greely, and took work as a nurse. How frustrating that must have been for this gutsy, stubborn gal. Probably the stress had something to do with her TB flaring up. Sick and weak, Anderson moved to Fraser, Colorado to recuperate or die. She breathed not a word of her vocation.

But word got out, as it always does, and her health improved. I wonder if the two events are related? At any rate, the citizens of remote Fraser were delighted to have a doctor. They didn’t care if she was male, female, or a different species entirely. Everyone from lumberjacks to ranchers to pregnant wives came to see her. She occasionally even treated a sick horse.

In her career as a doctor, “Doc Susie” was paid with everything from firewood to food. Cash was an extreme rarity and her living conditions reflected that. Nearly destitute, sometime around 1915 or so she was appointed the Grand County Coroner and the regular pay check helped ease some of her financial concerns.

She never owned a car but always found a way to visit her patients. Most often she walked, sometimes in hip-deep snow. Mostly, though, friends and family members of patients provided transportation. Anderson was not rich financially, but she earned an esteemed reputation as a fine rural doctor and diagnostician. Her life was not easy but I think that’s how she would have wanted it. She liked fighting for her accomplishments.

She conquered a frontier, both real and emotional, leaving behind a path for other women who dared to dream big. Anderson practiced in Fraser until 1956 then retired to an old folks home in Denver. She died four years later and was buried with her family in Cripple Creek.

The point of Patriots in Lace is to remind my American sisters (whether they be American by birth or spirit), of our fiery and rebellious ancestors and, hence, the bloodlines we should honor. The old adage, “Well behaved women rarely make history” is true. The history-making women of previous generations were passionate, obstinate, tempestuous, and indomitable. Probably they didn’t see themselves as such at the time. They were just doing what came naturally.

So let’s talk about Josephine Sarah Marcus, or the woman known to Wyatt Earp fans as Josey, his common-law wife. Josey was a hellion, pure and simple. A pretty Jewish girl stifled by middle class boredom, she ran away from home at 18 to join a theatrical troupe. This troupe traveled the west and, by all accounts, this young lady was giddy with the power her freedom and beauty bought her. She drank, she danced, she flirted. In 1879 Wyatt Earp saw her perform in Dodge City. He saw her; Josey, however, failed to notice Wyatt.

God gave her a second chance.

Both of them would wind up in the warm and friendly boomtown of Tombstone a year later. Ironically, this was Josey’s second visit. She had returned to Tombstone due to the desperate pleas of Johnny Behan, the sheriff who couldn’t live without her and who had promised her parents he’d marry her. The two had a tumultuous relationship, at best, and it didn’t take long for Josey to figure out Behan was a two-timing jerk. One affair too many and her patience went up in smoke.

At Behan’s urging, Josey had used her money to build the couple’s abode which sat upon a lot he owned. When the two ended their relationship, Josey demanded Behan buy the house. He hemmed and hawed and tried to retain possession of the dwelling without paying. Clearly, he didn’t know who he was messing with. When he couldn’t/wouldn’t reimburse Josey, she simply had the house moved! Imagine the look on his face when he came home to an empty lot. Oh, hell hath no fury…

Hindsight is 20/20 and it is clear now that Josey only wound up in Tombstone for one reason. Wyatt Earp was her density—er, I mean, destiny. The electricity between the two was so noticeable it even earned a mention in the Tombstone Epitaph, much to Johnny’s chagrin. A myriad of circumstances contributed to the hard feelings between Earp and Behan and it’s probable that Josey figured into the mix.

Either way, when events turned treacherous in Tombstone and Wyatt had to call down the thunder on his brother’s murderers, he sent Josey back to San Francisco. He promised, however, that he would fetch her as soon as possible. Nearly a year and a string of dead bodies later, Wyatt did show up on her doorstep. They were inseparable for the next 46 years.

No, it wasn’t always bread and roses. Josey spent a lot of time sitting alone in hotel rooms while Wyatt gambled for their stake. But she was by his side when they worked in saloons, sold horses, panned for gold in the wilds of Alaska, and rambled around the California desert in search of lost mines. She stayed with him when they left Alaska $80,000 richer and she didn’t abandon him later when they couldn’t pay their rent. She fought ferociously to protect his reputation from a questionable biography and was the sole friend who heard his last words upon this earth. Who would have ever guessed such devotion and tenacity would come from an 18-year-old runaway?

Life on the Western frontier for a woman was hard enough. Can you imagine being a minority? There were probably few things treated with less respect than a black woman or an Oriental woman.

Meet Lalu Nathoy, AKA, Polly Bemis.

Of all the research I have done on pioneer and patriot women, Polly impresses me the most. Originally from China, in 1872 her father sold her off as a concubine. Polly’s worth: two bags of seeds for her starving family. She was smuggled into San Francisco and taken by an “intermediary” to the wild-and-wooly mining town of Warren, Idaho where she would be served up as a concubine for an Asian saloon-owner. Polly was only 19 years old.

Legend says Charlie Bemis won Polly in a poker game and immediately set her free. Apparently, Polly didn’t really need her freedom. She worked for Bemis for many years and finally married him in 1894. While it has been suggested this was a marriage of convenience, I have my doubts. True, a new federal law could have made it necessary for Polly to be deported and yes, she was actually threatened with deportation at one point, which led to a hasty wedding with Charlie. But she could have just left Idaho. She could have bid farewell to Charlie. She could have moved some place where Orientals weren’t treated so harshly. She chose, instead, to stay and fight.

Polly passionately sought to become a real, legal American citizen. I suspect citizenship appealed to her independence and I really don’t think marrying Charlie was all that distasteful of an idea, either. Admittedly, though, the marriage helped move her towards becoming a citizen. She still had to petition the courts and after more than two years of rigorous, legal wrangling, Polly became an American in 1896.

Shortly after this, she and Charlie moved seventeen miles out of Warren, homesteading along the Salmon River and working a gold claim together. Their cabin was so remote, it couldn’t be reached by road, only boat. For a marriage of convenience, they sure liked their privacy. The cabin was no castle, either. Measuring a mere 15×20 feet, it is impressive that she and Charlie never tried to kill each other. Personally, I believe that only true love could hold a couple together in these circumstances.

Charlie died in 1922. Polly continued to live alone along the Salmon River until 1933, when she suffered a debilitating stroke. Three months later, she passed away in a hospital at the young age of 80.

There are several great books on Polly, but I recommend Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn. McCunn has a passion for Polly’s story and you will discover things about this pioneering woman that will humble you and challenge you. It is an honor and blessing to be a woman. It is also a grand privilege to be an American.

Funny how authors seem to dip from the same cosmic well. They can write completely different novels, never meet each other or share information, yet similarities in the books can be staggering, even shocking. I’ve had this experience with my book, Living in Defiance. But rather than point out some spooky similarities between it and another author’s story, I want to talk about where fact and fiction meet.

Defiance is a fictional town in the San Juan mountain range of Colorado. The history of it is based loosely on the bawdy mining town of Mineral Point. In my story, three good, Christian girls roll into town and shake things up for God.

To my delight, I learned recently that the REAL town of Glenwood Springs, CO used to be named Defiance! And what happened to change the name? Why, a God-fearing, red-blooded American girl rolled into town. That’s what happened.

Sarah Cooper and her husband settled in the encampment of Defiance in 1883. A pair of no-nonsense Iowans, they weren’t thrilled with the name of the town or the behavior of the citizens and worked with the founders to incorporate the settlement into a real municipality. Law and order and churches followed and Sarah pushed to rename Defiance Glenwood Springs, after her hometown of Glenwood, Iowa.

Give an American pioneer woman an inch and she’ll take a mile every time. I love it.

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